


by any other name

by iguanastevens



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Coming of Age, Gen, Yuri Plisetsky-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-07
Updated: 2019-07-07
Packaged: 2020-06-23 20:51:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19709200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iguanastevens/pseuds/iguanastevens
Summary: "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet."Yuri's life as told by the names he's given; or, how Yuri's names direct his life.





	by any other name

_Yurachka_

He was Yurachka before he was Yuri.

Sometimes he thinks it’s true that the first time is always the best. Sure, the second, third, hundredth attempt might be tidy, polished, and technically perfect, but it’s also rote and empty. It makes him think of an artist painting the same flower over and over again for years, eventually forgetting to paint the flower and merely copying their own picture until it’s nothing more than a flat smear of flawless color.

Yurachka doesn’t have any medals.

He has flour under his fingernails and his small palm in Nikolai’s large, work-roughened hand. He has an easy, soft smile, a quick laugh, and someone to wipe away the tears he doesn’t have to hide. He has bruises from falling, bruises that will mark all his failures with increasing spite once he’s back at the rink, but until then they’re badges of honor, blue-black-purple-green splotches that make all his classmates wince in sympathetic respect when he rolls his trousers up to his knees to play football at lunch.

(Not that he’s Yurachka at school, of course – there, he’s Yuri, who scowls and scraps when the teachers aren’t looking, who presses his pencil into the letters so hard that the paper tears so they know that he’ll do as well as he has to, but they can’t make him _like_ it – but Yuri steps through the door and Dedushka smiles and just like that, Yurachka is back, tripping over his own words to say that he’s still the fastest runner even if he’s smaller than everyone else.)

He was Yurachka before he was Yuri.

Sometimes Yuri hates Yurachka: he’s too soft, too timid, too scared, always stuck to his grandfather’s side and leaving Yuri to face the world by himself. It’s Yuri who has to hold back his tears when he falls a little too hard or a little too often, and it’s Yuri who has to snarl and fight like a feral cat when the world won’t give him the space he needs.

But he was Yurachka before he was Yuri and Yuri – younger, wiser, tougher Yuri – can never bring himself to forget it. 

_The Russian Fairy_

It’s inevitable. Yuri feels the name settle on his shoulders when he’s nine years old and adults coo over his delicate grace. They don’t call him _Fairy_ , not exactly, not until he’s thirteen and he’s scented blood, not until he’s chasing down records, ready to shatter them the moment he’s finally close enough.

They don’t call him that, but Yuri knows it’s coming. He can hear it stalking behind him, a slender, bird-boned monster with windchime laughter and sparkling eyes. He can’t escape it, so he drains the victory from its marrow instead.

It chafes. Of course it does. He’s never been the beautiful fae child they want to see, and that – knowing, even at ten years old, that he’s not enough - stings nearly as much as the creeping boredom.

The Russian Fairy wins medal after medal, claiming scholarships and sponsors and opportunities, and that makes it tolerable for a while.

Besides, by the time he’s twelve, Yuri has met Viktor Nikiforov the Living Legend and flighty, analytical, half-smiling Viktor. He’s experienced enough to realize that, sometimes, you have to split your soul to avoid shattering it entirely. Yuri wants to skate, so he’ll pay this price and wear their mask.

(He hasn’t met Vitya, Yuuri’s fiancé, laughing, kind-hearted Vitya yet, nor has he been introduced to crying-on-the-toilet-Yuuri, who’s somehow also Katsudon with the too-sincere smile and _eros_ all at the same time. When he does, he’ll look at all his own faces and wonder if _maybe, just maybe…_ but that’s years and a half-dozen nicknames from now.)

Yuri tries to shed his gauzy wings once he has more to offer than calculated childlike wonder set to a piano score. 

It’s not as easy as he hoped, and in the end, _ethereal_ is too strong to give way to _real._

_The Russian Punk_

Outside of Yuri’s choreography, all bets are off. He makes a name for himself with black jeans, loud music, and slouching hoodies, and even if it’s usually accompanied with a patronizing eyeroll, Yuri wears it with pride.

The Russian Punk gets to be brash, prickly, and sullen, and that in itself is a thrill after years of soft-edged grace.

Yuri loves it: the Russian Punk is _cool._ He doesn’t care what people think. He doesn’t have to smile and make nice. He doesn’t have friends because he doesn’t need them.

(Sometimes he envies Mila’s easy affection and even Georgi’s monthly head-over-heels romantic tragedies, but Yuri isn’t good with people like Mila. He’s not even sure his heart could break. If it did, he decides, it would stay that way, even if Georgi is okay after some ice cream and American pop blasted through his flat until the speakers crackle. Yurachka is the only part of him who might be able to be friendly like they are, and he’s too shy to try.)

The Russian Punk is transient in a way the Fairy isn’t: _he’ll grow out of it,_ they say knowingly.

 _Like hell I will,_ the Punk growls back, full of grit and fire and his own heady existence, while Yuri silently cheers him on.

He cheers until Other-Yu(u?)ri cowers and the Punk is shouting and even though he’s _trying,_ the words don’t come out right. Yurachka wants to tell him that he could have won, that even Viktor can’t do a step sequence like him, that he owes himself so much more than a pity party in a dingy stall, but Yurachka is too quiet and so it’s left to the Punk to translate.

(Yuuri trounces him in a dance competition later. He’s drunk enough that he can’t walk in a straight line and still moving with an effortless fluidity that makes the Russian Fairy look like a newborn colt. Yuri takes this as a truce. He can’t stomach the gnawing guilt that’s been hounding him since their… talk. No harm, no foul, right?)

He cheers until Viktor chases Yuuri halfway across the globe, and then all he can do is scream with rage.

(Not pain, never pain. The Russian Punk doesn’t care. He’s only collecting his dues. It doesn’t hurt his feelings to have a promise broken so easily.)

_The Ice Tiger of Russia_

It never catches on, not really.

Mila teases him with it until she catches him turning away, lips pressed tightly together around a _fuck you_ that’s as soggy as undercooked bread. She stops after that, but Yuri doesn’t tell anyone else.

The Angels got hold of it somehow – probably from the tags on an old Instagram post – but they don’t take to it either.

It’s _his,_ though, and if it’s childish, it’s only because he’d dared to name himself instead of letting someone else define him by what they wanted to see. Yuri never called himself _Fairy_ or _Punk:_ he just wore them.

 _And so what if it’s childish,_ he sometimes wants to yell, _because guess what, I’m a fucking kid!_

The Ice Tiger of Russia is an anthem of everything he is and everything he’ll become, and anyone who laughs can kiss his ass when they figure out that tigers are just as fond of playing as they are of hunting.

_Kitten_

Fuck that. Fuck anyone who calls him that, anyone who takes one of the only things he’s been brave enough to openly love without adding chains and spikes and turns it into a weapon designed to make him small.

This is why Yurachka hides. This is why the Punk doesn’t give a shit about anything.

Then he thinks about Potya, how she’d been a tiny white cotton ball small enough to fit in the palm of his hand, and decides that everyone who thinks they can insult him can get extra super fucked. Potya had hissed at Makkachin, fifty times her size, until the poodle hid behind the couch for an hour.

They want to call him a kitten?

Fine.

They can deal with the claws.

_Yurio_

If he can’t have his name, then no one can. He calls Yuuri _Katsudon_ when he really means _thief,_ and he means _thief_ because anything else would be admitting that Yuri himself is only second-best.

And that’s all it is, isn’t it?

As Viktor says, smiling, pretending he doesn’t realize that Katsudon is about to barf on the ice and Yuri’s on the verge of tearing Viktor’s throat out with his teeth: _may the better man win._

Yuri tells himself that _when_ he wins, he’ll be Yuri and Yuuri will be… no, he won’t be Yuurio, because Viktor will be back in Russia like he promised. If he wants a routine from Viktor, he can win his own fucking bet like Yuri already has.

(For a moment, standing under the waterfall with Yuuri, he’s not Yurio. He’s not Yurachka or the Russian Fairy or the Russian Punk or the Ice Tiger of Russian or Yura – he’s all of them at once, named and nameless, and it gives him a headache he later blames on the pounding current battering his skull.)

(For a moment, texting Yuuko late one night, he’s not Yurio. She notices his pause and asks, _what would you like me to call you?_ and it takes him a while to answer. He types _Yuri_ and _Yura_ and _I don’t care,_ unable to find the words to describe how he’d felt in the waterfall, not sure how to explain that he just wants to recognize himself in his name.)

_Yurachka_

It’s the Angels this time. He panics at first, partly because there are so many of them and they’re so close and so _loud,_ but mostly because no one is allowed to call him that except Dedushka. They don’t have a right to it; Yurachka isn’t _theirs._

It helps that they can’t pronounce it quite right.

He gets used to it, though it leaves a bad taste in his mouth.

_Yurachka_

It’s startling when Yakov says it, gruff and grumbling and _proud._

His grandfather is gruff, grumbling, and so, so proud of him, but it’s different: Yakov’s pride is about what he does, not who he is, and _Yurachka_ isn’t a name that can be earned with broken records or medals.

Yuri doesn’t hate it. He’s not sure he likes it, either, but Yakov is also a little bit of a Russian Punk screaming in toilet stalls, and it makes Yurachka smile.

(It’s Yurachka who cooks pirozhki for Yakov and Lilia, giggling as Lilia grimaces at the bits of dough caught under her long, manicured nails, then wheezing with laughter while Yakov juggles a too-hot pastry he’d tried to steal when Lilia wasn’t looking. _There’s a trick to it,_ Yurachka whispers after dinner. _You have to make a tester, and then you eat that one to check if they came out right._ )

_Yuri_

“Yuri, get on.”

The Angels are screeching for Yurachka. Otabek Altin has a means of escape.

He said Yuri’s name like Yuri was a book, one he’d read the summary for but was waiting until the final chapter to decide what the story was about. He said it like a question.

At first, Yuri tries to show him what’s left of the Russian Punk, but Otabek nods in solemn appreciation when he plays a song that everyone else says sounds like a collapsing building and asks if he’s heard of another band, _here, let me…_

They’re not the Hero of Kazakhstan and the Russian Fairy, even if that’s what the tabloids call them.

_Yuri Nikolaievich Plisetsky_

He skates Agape, named and nameless, and it starts to make sense. 

**Author's Note:**

> (looks at my other WIPs) SOON, I SWEAR.


End file.
